I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.

It turns out that the same is true for transactions: in fact, it's necessary in Web Services if you want to glue together disparate services and domains, some of which may not be using the same transaction implementation behind the service boundary. I still think the best specification to illustrate this relaxation of the various properties is WS-BusinessProcess, part of WS-TransactionManager (OASIS WS-CAF). Although Eric and I came up with the original concept, we were never able to sell it to our co-authors on WS-TX (so far). I think one of our failings was to not write enough papers, articles or blogs about the benefits it offered and the practicalities it fit. However, every time I explained it to people in the field it was such an easy sell for them to understand how it fit into the Web Services world so much better than other approaches. (The original idea behind WS-BP came from some of the RESTful transactions work we did in HP, where it was code-named the JFDI-transaction implementation.)